“This is not open for debate, Detective,” he said coldly. “While I appreciate the spirit behind your theatrics, my decision is made. The case stays off the priority list. We’ll continue normal investigations as required, but I don’t want to hear a peep out of you about your unfounded conspiracy rumors. From here on out, our official statement is that this whole tragedy was caused by a big drug cartel pushing a bad batch of meth. End of story.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Will warned. “If we don’t act fast, we—”
“End. Of. Story.” Korigan growled. The sound was almost guttural, making Will take an involuntary step back. When he looked up again, though, Korigan was back to normal, smiling and slick as ever as he stood up from his desk. “Go home, Detective,” he said, turning to grab his heavy felt overcoat from the hook on the wall. “You’ve been working too much, and it’s starting to affect your judgment. Don’t make me put you on medical leave.”
The tone was friendly, but Will knew a threat when he heard one. He was starting to see how Korigan had wormed his way into the top law enforcement office in the city. The man was a smooth operator who knew how to control those below him. He certainly had Will by the balls. With those two terrifying words—“medical leave”—the chief had all the ammunition he needed to take Will off the case entirely. At this point, Will’s only choice was stand his ground and possibly lose everything, or back down and play along. Neither appealed to him, but Will was used to hard choices, and just because he was being forced down didn’t mean he was out of the game entirely.
“If you say so, sir,” he said quietly, looping his thumbs through his belt. “But where are you going? Little late for an opera, isn’t it?”
“My affairs are none of your business,” Korigan replied. “But for the record, I’m off to a party.” He flashed Will a sharp smile. “An active social life is important for maintaining mental health. You should try it sometime.”
Will scowled, but before he could think of a comeback, Korigan walked around his desk to open the door. “Thank you for telling me your concerns, Detective. My door is always open to my officers—although next time I’m going to insist you actually knock. But I’m afraid I have to get going. Good night, Mr. Tannenbaum.”
The obvious dismissal made Will bristle. It was not in his nature to back down from a fight. He’d learned long ago that the only way to get what you wanted in life was to bite down and never let go. Tonight, though, the practical cynicism from a decade of police work told him that pushing back now would only make things worse, so he forced himself to let it go, stepping back out into the dark hallway seconds before the police chief closed the glass door in his face.
The cold silence of the empty hall was insult to injury. But while Chief Korigan could threaten his job, he couldn’t tell him what to do during his free time, and all of a sudden, Will was in the mood to do a little driving. That thought brought a smile to his face, and as fast as he’d been kicked out, Will changed course, hurrying out of the building with only a brief stop at his desk to print out a copy of the case file that was no longer marked priority to anyone but him.
The moment Tannenbaum was gone, Victor Korigan locked his office and walked down the hall to the private elevator that went down to the underground lot reserved for high-ranking government officials. After checking his bow tie one last time, he climbed into the armored Hummer the city provided for his safety and told the driver to take him to the address on the invitation he’d been waiting for all day.
The one he’d received mere moments before Tannenbaum had charged into his office.
That had been unfortunate. Men like Tannenbaum were ticking time bombs—overinvested, convinced of their own righteousness, and, worst of all, highly resistant to bribes. Even so, he’d hoped to put off dealing with him for a little while longer. Obnoxious as he was in other ways, Tannenbaum was a good detective. He did his job, kept his nose clean, and was popular on the force, all of which made him difficult to remove. But removed he would have to be. Korigan had been given control of the Chicago PD precisely to keep chaos elements like Tannenbaum from disturbing carefully laid plans. It was a position he’d fought long and hard for, and if Tannenbaum insisted on threatening his cultivated equilibrium, then the detective would have to go. Simple as that.
But that was tomorrow’s problem. Tonight, he had far bigger, far better fish to fry, as the engraved summons in his hands proved. Technically, it was an invitation to a party, but the name at the top told Korigan that it was so much more than that, and he could hardly keep himself still as his driver followed the GPS through the slushy, frozen streets of late-night Chicago until he reached the giant brick-faced four-story mansion sprawling at the center of a mile-long stretch of Lake Michigan–bank property on the edge of the city limits.
Despite the fact that it was now nearly 2 am, the party inside was still in full swing, the energy coming from the house almost tangible. The moment Korigan’s Hummer pulled up to the front entrance, a uniformed valet rushed out to get his door, welcoming him without once glancing at his face. Returning the favor, Korigan ignored the man and dismissed his driver with a wave as he walked toward the entrance, climbing the carefully swept and salted stone steps to the Gilded Age mansion’s elegant double doors.
Stepping inside was like walking into Hollywood’s ideal of debased opulence. Everywhere Korigan’s eyes fell, beautiful people—male and female—were lounging on antique furniture, gazing up at the fat, graying bodies of Chicago’s elite with the sort of overt sexual excitement only lots of money could buy. White-coated waiters circled through the rooms offering guests silver trays laden with flutes of champagne, delicate French pastries, and mountains of coke. In one parlor, two huge men were trying to kill each other on the billiard table while a circle of gentlemen in tuxes cheered them on, yelling out bets and trading huge rolls of cash every time a punch landed. In another, a pair of identical girls lay naked on the dining table, their slender bodies covered in a rainbow of beautifully cut sushi that guests removed with long silver chopsticks.
The excessive debauchery made Korigan’s pulse quicken, but not for the usual reasons. He’d sold his military services to dictators and kings for decades now. Sins of the flesh were just part of doing business. Even to his jaded eyes, though, this was a party for the ages, but he’d expected nothing less from the home of Christopher St. Luke.
St. Luke was Chicago’s most eccentric billionaire. Notorious, too. His weekly parties were the stuff of tabloid legend, as were the untold millions he’d donated to the campaigns of local politicians. But what the papers didn’t know was that the lion’s share of St. Luke’s fortune wasn’t due to his pharmaceutical empire or the massive Chinese corporations he partnered with, but from a ruthless, multi-decade effort to take over the illegal drug market in the Midwest. A highly successful effort, as poor Tannenbaum was only now finding out.
Thinking about the detective made him chuckle. Poor boy would have had a heart attack if he knew where his boss had been headed when he’d burst in. But even if Korigan had laid out his evening plans in full, Tannenbaum couldn’t have grasped a tenth of what it really meant. His worldview was simply too small to comprehend the full scope of St. Luke’s ambitions. Korigan, however, understood them all too well, which was why he was here tonight.
Because he wanted in.
He’d courted St. Luke’s favor—protecting his opium farms in Afghanistan, punishing his enemies in Africa and South America, even bringing in a sub to sink his rival’s drug-running shipments off the coast of Florida—Korigan had finally hit the big time last summer when St. Luke had personally invited him to be part of his main team in his home base at Chicago. The promotion had cost him more than he was wise to give, but Korigan had learned the hard way that power in this world—real power, the kind that outlasted death—was a matter of birth and privilege. After years of scrapping in the dirt, he’d turned his pack of war dogs into one of the world’s most profitable
mercenary companies. But even then, despite all his work, all his money, he’d been a fly to men like St. Luke. No matter how far he’d climbed, the glittering world of real power was always as far above him as the stars above the desert. Now, though, his work was finally paying off. After almost a decade of service, the dragon had finally looked down and taken notice, and Korigan was determined to do whatever it took to climb the last few rungs of the ladder and take his rightful place at the top of the world.
That was the plan, anyway. And it’s why he was in Chicago. But for all his time here, this was his first invitation to actually meet his mysterious employer. Now, standing in the entry of his famous mansion, even the ever-steady Commander Korigan was shaking with excitement as he grabbed the nearest servant and spoke the words he’d been waiting ten years to say.
“Take me to St. Luke.”
The name alone was enough to make the young man look nervous, but he clearly knew who Korigan was, and he didn’t ask questions. He simply motioned for the police chief to follow him as he made his way through the wild drug-fueled escapades going on in the front of the house to the slightly quieter, but no less extravagant, party going on in the back.
The huge hall that ran along the side of the mansion facing the lake had clearly been intended as a ballroom. Now, though, it looked—and smelled and sounded—like the inside of a sultan’s harem. Everywhere he looked, beautiful, naked bodies of both sexes lay in writhing piles on enormous silken pillows. Interspersed between them were giant hookahs and opium pipes, their trays of coals glowing like hellfire in the smoky dark as they filled the room with their heavy, intoxicating scent.
Just stepping into the place was enough to give Korigan a slight contact high, but he’d spent enough time in the worst scumholes in the third world to be virtually immune to narcotics at this point. Which meant that he was able to scan the room and see that, while this was clearly the party’s inner sanctum, the man he’d come to meet wasn’t here. Instead, the servant who’d led him here motioned for Korigan to wait and scuttled over to the nearest pile of pillows to speak to a man currently buried under multiple women. There was a brief exchange, and then the man stood up, his drugged lovers rolling off him like raindrops as he shrugged his muscular fighter’s body into the dark jacket and leather pants the servant discreetly handed him. When he was presentable, the man reached down and picked up a sword off the floor. Not a replica or showpiece, either, but an actual long-handled slightly curving blade with clear wear marks notched into its edge. The man checked his weapon and slipped it into a sheath on his belt before sending the servant fleeing with a wave of his hand as he turned to greet Chicago’s chief of police.
“Well, well, look who’s wandered in out of the cold.”
Korigan’s jaw tightened. This was not the man he’d come to see, but it also wasn’t someone he could ignore. He’d never personally met the tall, lanky, dark-skinned man, but he’d talked to him on the phone enough to recognize the voice. This was Lincoln Black, head of St. Luke’s operations in Chicago for the last eight months and, if one gave credit to the rumors, St. Luke’s own personal monster.
Personally, Korigan wasn’t sure how much of that last part he believed. Every two-bit gang lord and drug kingpin cultivated a bloody reputation to keep the troops in line, but he’d played up his own reputation as a monster enough to have very high standards for the real thing. Still, watching Lincoln Black as he slipped on a pair of mirror-polished black leather shoes before turning to walk soundlessly toward him through the smoke, a killer’s smile stretching his face, Korigan couldn’t help but think that maybe this time, the rumors didn’t go far enough.
“Nice monkey suit,” Black said, stopping to look Korigan’s best tux up and down. “Lemme guess, you’re all dressed up to see the wizard.”
“I’m here to see St. Luke,” Korigan said coldly, lifting his chin to show Black just how unimpressed he was by the attack-dog routine. “He wants a report on operational security after the recent series of junkie freak-outs.” He narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
Black smiled. “We all have our roles to play, policeman,” he said as he turned around, beckoning over his shoulder for Korigan to follow.
Grudgingly, Korigan did, moving behind Black and stepping out of the ballroom turned opium den, through a door into a side hallway lined with picture windows overlooking the mansion’s snow-covered lawn. Unlike the rest of the house, though, there was no party here. Just a plain, empty hall running down the length of the house to what appeared to be a dead end. As they got closer, however, Korigan realized that the subtly striped paper covering the wall at the hall’s end was actually an optical illusion. There was a door here, an opening lined up perfectly with the stripes so as to be invisible when viewed from the front. Even after he’d spotted it, it wasn’t until Black actually stepped through where the wall should have been that Korigan’s eyes finally realized the deception, leaving him a little dizzy as he walked through himself. Korigan stepped sideways past the hidden corner and through a small wooden door into a room completely cut off from the bacchanal just feet away.
It was not large, but unlike the hall leading up to it, the secret space was anything but plain. Everything inside—the walls, the floor, even the ceiling—was swarming with ornate decorations that, in keeping with the man who owned them, seemed to be competing to display the most outrageous examples of sin in all its myriad forms.
Elegant oil paintings depicted Catholic nightmares of satanic rituals and cloven-hoofed women tempting priests from their churches, while the long runner carpet was a nest of snakes and apples. But while Biblical themes were dominant, the decorations weren’t limited to Western debauchery. Beautifully detailed Japanese watercolor depictions of unclean souls suffering appropriate punishments at the hands of demons in the eight Buddhist hells hung beside Hindi carvings depicting Yama, God of Death, overseeing the torture of a wide variety of sinners. It was the sort of collection you’d expect being protested at an edgy museum looking for press, but other than a quick assessment, Korigan didn’t spare the art more than a glance. His eyes were locked on the man standing in the middle of it all.
Not surprisingly, Christopher St. Luke looked exactly like he did on television: a handsome, fit man in his late fifties with winking blue eyes, silver-fox hair, and a wry smile that made him appear like he was constantly appreciating a joke you weren’t sophisticated enough to understand. Like the partygoers at the front of his mansion, he was dressed in a suit that cost more than the average American made in a decade, but unlike them, he wore it like it didn’t matter. The ridiculously expensive tux—which Korigan could have traded for a year’s worth of food for him and his men in the old days—was just clothing to him. Black-and-white fabric not worthy of special regard. It was like he lived in an entirely different reality, one Korigan would trade any life on the planet to be part of, and he could barely keep his fingers from shaking as he reached out to take the billionaire’s offered hand.
“The infamous Victor Korigan,” St. Luke said, shaking Korigan’s hand not quite hard enough to hurt. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you in person. I’ve been very impressed with your work so far keeping the police so agreeably out of my hair.”
“I do my best, as always, sir,” Korigan said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. This was his big shot. He wouldn’t ruin it with overconfidence. “Thank you for inviting me tonight.”
“It was long past due,” St. Luke said with a wide smile. “You’ve done good work for me for some time now, and today was no exception. I’m very pleased with how you handled the curveball we threw you today.”
Korigan’s jaw twitched. “You’re talking about the ODs.”
“I am,” St. Luke said. “Bet your boys weren’t expecting those.”
“They weren’t,” Korigan agreed, suddenly angry. “And neither was I. It would have been simpler if you’d warned me you were trying something new befor
ehand. If I’d known you were looking to get rid of police informers, I could have come up with something far less disruptive.”
“But if I’d warned you, I wouldn’t have seen just how well you handled emergencies,” St. Luke said. “And that was far more valuable to me than what kind of noise it created. In fact, the noise was a crucial element. It was a test, Korigan. One of many, and you passed your part with flying colors. Seven crazed junkies go flying off the handle over the last twenty-four hours. One even managed to kill a cop, and yet the only blip I’ve seen about it is a statement on the Chicago PD website warning about a bad batch of meth.” He grinned. “That’s some quality situation control, Korigan. That’s why I brought you into my Chicago operation. And now that I know you can live up to expectations, I think it’s time I brought you in on the rest.”
Korigan’s heart skipped a beat, the surprise neatly washing away his anger at being played like a fool. If he hadn’t heard it himself, he never would have believed it. It just didn’t seem possible that after so many years of fighting and crawling and killing his way up the ladder, he was finally being invited into the inner circle. He’d worked for St. Luke long enough to know he was much more than a drug kingpin with a respectable front. The man in front of him represented power on a global scale. Power untouchable to someone like Korigan.
He’d been born with less than nothing, an unwanted child of an unwed mother in the worst days of the failing Yugoslavia. Shunned by his family and branded an embarrassment, Korigan had scraped by after his mother abandoned him for a new husband and a second shot at life, not caring that her son was barely being given a chance at a first. So he’d begged and stolen, done whatever it took to survive until he was old enough to join the one group that didn’t care about his background: the army.
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